This a social media strategy plan that can benefit all aspiring entrepreneurs. The presentation talks about Andrew Cohen’s sports blog - ‘On the can’ and how to turn it into a money making business! By using ‘On the can’ as an example, the presentation formulates a strategy to turn bloggers into billionaires.
3. Overview
Business Model and Strategy metrics
POST model - (Social Media Strategy)
Tools & Technologies
Using SEO & Analytics for STP
Partnering opportunities
Ecommerce business
Risk Assessment
Conclusion
4. Business Model
Online Advertising
Getting paid for content
Ecommerce opportunities
Key strategy metrics
Quality of content
Visitors/Traffic
Analytics – STP
5. POST Model for On the Can
People Objectives
• Socially savvy audience • Earn $$ from the content
• Investors: Sports media from $0 to $100
• Socially aware and mature users • Increase daily traffic
• Passionate about local teams from 100s to 10,000s
• Vocal on Facebook, Twitter etc. • Improve Google search ranking
appear on 1st page
Strategy Technology
• Media-rich, high-quality content • SEO widgets in Wordpress
• Search Engine Optimization • Facebook for gamification
• Real-time updates on local teams • Twitter for real-time updates
• Opinion polls, awards and raffles • Google Adsense, Analytics
• Giving subscribers added benefits • YouTube video channel
• Online advertising
6. Tools and technologies
Search Social
E-commerce Mobile Multimedia Weblog
Engine Network
• Analytics • Facebook • Affiliate • App • Podcast • CMS
• SEO • Twitter Products • SMS • Video- • RSS
• Ads • API sharing • email
Marketing Content
Management
7. SEO & Analytics
• Before deciding what to sell, determine who you’re going to sell it to
• Analytics tools provide users’ demographic data such as age,
gender, and education level
8. Partnerships
Increase viewership
Make money
Complementary
9.
10.
11. Hiring or Outsourcing Bloggers
If you don’t have the expertise, hire
someone who does
Retain old readers or attract new
ones
12.
13. Retailer and E-commerce on site
We are going to start selling sport related products in the blog. To increase
revenues
Those products include.
Our brand of sport equipment at a low cost
Premium brands of sport equipment
Memorabilia
Tickets to sports events.
Sport tours
14. Using sponsored posts/products
Using sponsored post is the good way to include
advertising in our blog to increase revenue.
we are going to limit the sponsored post to just one per
month and they are going to be related to sport
equipment
Because it can affect can affect our credibility among
our readers.
payperpost.com and sponsoredreviews.com
15. Risk Assessment
Frequency of content
Competition from other blogs
Overwhelming use of technologies
Mitigation techniques
Multiple authors, sourcing from others
Analytics
Use services such as HubSpot
16. Conclusion
Business Model and Strategy metrics
POST model - (Social Media Strategy)
Tools & Technologies
Using SEO & Analytics for STP
Partnering opportunities
Ecommerce business
Risk Assessment
Conclusion
Editor's Notes
Hi Miranda!! – We are excited to present to you a social media strategy plan that will benefit not one – but many, many aspiring entrepreneurs. We will be talking about Andrew Cohen’s sports blog - ‘On the can’ and how to turn it into a money making business! By using ‘On the can’ as an example, what we really want to do is – to formulate a strategy that turns bloggers <<Click>> into billionaires!!! <<Click>>
Let’s look at the overview – We will start with the most important thing – the business model and overall key strategy metrics, then jump right into the POST framework to describe the social media strategy and the tools and technologies that will help us get there. Next we will cover various important aspects of the implementation – such as using SEO and analytics. Keeping with the broad scope of this topic, we then touch upon a couple of ways of maintaining the business growth – namely – partnering opportunities and ecommerce business possibility. Last, but not least, we will do risk assessment of this plan and end with a conclusion.<<Click>>
Note forTamanna – there are a couple of animations on this slide. Please click the mouse whereever it says “<<Click>>”What are the different ways a blogger can earn money? <<Click>> Online advertising is of course on the top of the monetization list – afterall Google earns over 80% of their revenue this way. Bloggers can be featured on popular sports media websites or video channels. These are cases where bloggers get paid directly for writing popular content. Last but not least, once the blog turns into a brand – there could be Ecommerce opportunities. For example, a dedicated store for ‘On the can’ novelties.Now that we have talked about different ways of monetizing the blog, let’s look at key business strategy metrics – At the heart of any blogger’s business strategy is high-quality, compelling content that the target audience cannot live without! Of course the content won’t make a difference unless you have eyeballs on it – so the next key strategy metric is traffic or number of visitors on the blog. Finally, in any business – you get what you measure – so it is critical to understand key analytics based on the segmentation, targeting and positioning of “On the can”. If we look at this strategy in Porter’s competitive forces framework, we quickly realize that two key barriers to entry here are - high-quality content and leveraging network effects to build up web-traffic. <<Click>>
Let’s zoom in on the social media strategy using the POST model.We’ll start with people – “On the can” target audience is socially savvy, sports fanatic – typically American male in the age group of 16-35. Potential investors in this space are any popular sports media companies such as ESPN. The target audience is typically passionate about specific teams and is quite vocal on various social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. For example, fans and readers were unstoppable with their opinions on the latest second round pick for New England Patriots – Tavon Wilson.As far as the objectives are concerned, we have set modest targets for ‘On the can’ since we are just starting out on the social media front. The assumption here is that Andrew will be able to provide end-less stream of high-quality sports content for the blog. And increasing web-traffic and search engine optimization become the key objective for social media strategy. Dollars earned from online advertising should be a natural consequence of increased traffic as long as the Adsense settings offer relevant advertising.On the strategy side, besides the content, ‘On the can’ would want to introduce gamification elements on the blog as well as on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. As far as the Technology is concerned, using the search engine optimization guide from Google to understand how to improve the page ranking, using Facebook for engaging with the audience in-between blog posts and Twitter for real-time updates on important events would be the key features.
There are many technologies that can be used to manage content and increase the traffic and revenue of a weblog. Search engines notably Google are the most important marketing tool. It’s important to optimize the website for search engine in order to attract more advertisers and visitors to the weblog.Weblogs could be tied in to social networking sites to announce new blog posts. One approach could be making a Facebook page and adding ‘like’ button on the weblog to connect users to that. The other approach is using Twitter to announce new posts and attract visitors.Weblog could become an affiliate with ecommerce site like Amazon to sell sport-related products. It’s possible to create a unique web store by using Amazon aStore API.Regarding the tremendous growth in smart phones, creating an app could draw attention of more people to the weblog as people have a more convenient access to the website content.Weblog is not just about text. It’s possible to deliver the same content in audio and video format. The content should also be hosted on file-sharing sites like YouTube in order to attract new visitors.Weblogs are created by content management systems such as WordPress. It’s common to use RSS to share content between different websites. Also visitors are informed of new posts through email lists.All these technologies demand a lot of energy and time from bloggers. Therefore bloggers have to pick the one which is more productive for their purpose.
If OnTheCan is going to sell products it should first determine exactly who its audience is. Google Analytics currently provides the geographic location of our audience. Other tools like Alexa provide detailed demographic information such as age, gender, and educational attainment. Such information will allow OnTheCan to choose products to sell that are specifically targeted to its audience. For example, if OnTheCan tends to young women then perhaps it can sell discounts for women's’ running shoes.
As it is, trying to make money from your blog can be tough. Doing it alone can be even harder. (click) But partnering with other blogs or intermediary companies can be a great way to monetize your blog. Partnering with another blog means joining forces to increase viewership (click). You can also get paid for making your blog a part of theirs, or vice versa (click). When searching for a potential blog to partner with, be sure to look for blogs whose style complements yours (click).
(click) Here’s an example of one website that partnered with a larger one. Oddee.com is a blog that features the “odd, strange and bizarre things of our world.” (click) As seen here, oddee.com has partnered with buzzfeed and huffpost weird news. Both of these are larger blogs that feature very similar content. Let’s see how oddee partnered up on buzzfeed
(click next slide)here is the buzzfeed main page. Like oddee, it features weird and interesting things from around the world, but it’s larger than oddee. If we scroll down (click)we can see an entire area designated for buzzfeeds partners. Here, we can see that some of the featured partners include TMZ and The Daily beast, and Oddee (click). There is even a “Partner with Us” button below (click).
Let’s imagine that you ran a sports blog, and you wrote about baseball, football, and hockey. You know that your readers love reading about basketball (click), but the problem is that you don’t know very much about basketball, so you can’t blog much about it. This is a perfect opportunity to (click) hire or outsource other bloggers to contribute to your blog. If you’re aware that your readers are interested in certain topics, but you don’t have the expertise to write about it, you hire another blogger to write for you (click). That way, you can either retain more readers, or attract new ones (click).
Take a look at ESPN’s website. (click) Here, we can see that ESPN features content by Mike Reiss to cover the Patriots. Reiss covered the Patriots in a number of other publications and started his own popular Patriots blog in 2004. This is an example of how ESPN hired a blogger to write about the Patriots on their website. By making Reiss one of their contributing bloggers, ESPN not only drew in readers who wanted to hear more about the Patriots, they also brought along all of Reiss’ fans.
Setting up “OTC” retailer and E-commerce on site We are going to start selling sport related products in the blog. To increase revenues Those products include. Our brand of sport equipment at a low costPremium brands of sport equipment MemorabiliaTickets to sports events.Sport tours We are going to establish a space to advertise in one corner of the articles, the product that we are going to offer will depend on the article that the blogger has writing. For example: If we are going to talk about a future sport event we will advertise: Sport tours for that or similar events.Tickets to the eventSport equipment related to that sport The client if he is interested he will click on the product, get more information and pay using PayPal or Google checkout If we are going to comment about a game that occur long time ago or a former player we will advertise: Our brand of sport equipment at a low costPremium brands of sport equipment Memorabilia.
Using sponsored posts/products Using sponsored post is the good way to include advertising in our blog to increase revenue. However we are going to limit the sponsored post to just one per month and they are going to be related to sport equipment only, we do not want to do more than one per month and discuss other topics because it can affect can affect our credibility among our readers. To find clients we are going to use payperpost.com and sponsoredreviews.com, which are website that provide a connection between bloggers and clients.